Don’t Mess With a Bunch of Pissed-Off Medievalists

Paleography is the study of old handwriting—the fine art of telling Corbie AB from Beneventan from Carolingian minuscule. It may seem weird, esoteric, and irrelevant—the sort of thing that Dungeons and Dragons players do when they grow out of rolling their D20s. Well, it is weird and nerdy, but, much like statistics and server maintenance, it’s far from irrelevant.

You see, people in the past didn’t write in 12-point Times New Roman. The monks recopying Cicero and Lucretius in medieval monasteries used something that looks, to the modern eye, like a code. Before all those ancient texts we use in our classrooms and our research could be read and analyzed and synthesized and published in textbooks, they had to be deciphered. Paleography also helps us find out how texts relate to one another, and helps us date and even place their location. Without paleography, we wouldn’t have history, and we’d be missing a huge chunk of Western culture. Paleography, in other words, Is Important. It’s the “basic science” of history that lets new discoveries be made.

The folks at King’s College London seem to think otherwise. As Cambridge Classics don Mary Beard reported in her blog, the pointy-heads at that institution have decided to “create financially viable academic activity by disinvesting from areas that are at sub-critical level with no realistic prospect of extra investment.” To decipher their code, what this means is that the country’s only endowed paleography chair isn’t bringing in money and, being dedicated to the scribblings of dead white men, isn’t serving any political purpose, so it’s being downsized. Never mind the cultural value or the distinguished history of the chair: Show me the money. (One wonders if the reason that the so-called Dark Ages were so ill-documented is because barbarian kings and churchmen also decided to “disinvest from areas that were at sub-critical level,” like writing history and recopying ancient literature, and instead decided to concentrate on copying Bibles and whacking one another.)

The response to this was immediate and amazing. Professor Beard called for a public outcry and no less an imposing figure than Jeffrey Hamburger, head of Medieval Studies at Harvard, has taken the lead in protesting the decision. There’s a Facebook group for you to join and an online petition. Thousands of people have already signed up. The paleography chair at King’s may be doomed, but it will not go gentle into that good night.

All of this goes to show the truth of what I have constantly said: The value of esoteric subjects like paleography and medieval history isn’t in the dollars and cents (or pounds and pence). It’s that people are legitimately, passionately interested in them. There is a worldwide market demand for these studies, and in this era of interconnection and the “long tail” marketing plan, this demand can not be ignored.